View Random photos taken at the farm below:
The farm Katboschfontein is where I call home! We moved here in 1979 from Bedfordview when I was in Standard 3 – Standard 4 and 5 were completed at Sundra Laerskool (Heaven help me – I do not quite know how I survived that particular ordeal!) and from there I went back to Queens High School as a boarder.
Instead of going to study Veterinary Science at Onderstepoort, somehow or other I found myself running the dairy for five years after school – it was a little bit like Little House on the Prairie in those days, don’t let what you see today fool you! That was where I got my first Rottie and where the love affair with them started – a long, long time ago!
Enough about me, this is the farm blog page. It is an intertwined family history farm story – perhaps one day I will direct a movie about how it all happened…but that is a story for another day!
Dairy is the main vein of what goes on here – I had a dairy shop for 17 years as a result of selling milk directly to the public which was more profitable for the dairy business. At any given time there are around 2000 Holstein Cows on the farm – to keep the numbers simple, let’s say half of them get milked – three times a day. The rest have to be counted because each one has to be fed!! The rest consist of dry cows (each cow is dry for two months before she calves) and calves and growing heifers that will hopefully become dairy cows when they are big…Most of the food for the herd is produced on the farm – silage and hay most notably.
All the milk is processed in the factory – bottled and packed into sachets – yogurt and Amasi are also on the list of available goodies. Trading under the Dairydale brand, producs are delivered all over the East Rand. Packing for other companies under their label also goes on and most of the milk used in coffee shops in Jhb or Pretoria comes from here even though it may be packed under the different labels.
Interesting fact that most people don’t pick up on – Cows have to produce a calf in order to produce milk – they do not, in fact, produce milk because they happened to be black and white!
There are no bulls on this farm – (a bit of bullshit occasionally, not quite sure where that comes from haha) – all the cows are impregnated via Artificial Insemination – a craft for which I have a certificate nogal! Yes – those who have known me for a very long time will be able to tell you some stories about all that!!
Back to the dogs – Rottweilers have featured on this farm since 1987 and my first litter was registered with KUSA in 1988 – am I giving my age away? The name DE LIEMERS was first used when I applied to KUSA for a Kennel Name – subsequent to that it is now the name of every other business associated with this family.
Initially the dogs featured as protection for the family as well – these are the realities of living in South Africa and so I have no objection when people ask for dogs to protect them. As long as the dogs are also part of the family, they most certainly are a deterrent for the unsavoury element that might be peeking over the wall!
In those days, a pack of 13 Rottweilers that went everywhere with me was quite a thing – I don’t think that I fully appreciated the freedoms of those days with my dogs – now that the farming has expanded to the extent that it has, other people also live here (and their Jack russels – they are all over the place!!), so obviously things had to change and that is how the setup we have today came about.
